http://www.reconinstruments.com/

thanks for posting the link to draftday, cts. i am one of the founders of the site and we definitely aren't the first to market. meaning, our idea is not original. it's all about execution.

cardrunners was not the first poker training site. hold'em manager was not the first poker software. it's all about executing the ideas.

looking forward to reading this thread and doing my best to execute on draftday!

Can you explain a bit more what you did exactly to differentiate yourself from the competition that preceded you?

for now -- better UX, focus on community, platform built and endorsed by tastemakers / trusted people in gaming space.

long term -- product offerings, social experience, among other things.

i feel excited to get into a market that is very small and has a real (imo) chance to explode. part of why i think we have a huge chance for success is just identifying a high-growth market early and acting super fast to try to capture a piece of it.

This is the whole ballgame...
Execution, execution, execution.

I've been milking a trading idea I got in 1992...
Year after year for nearly 20 years...
And could post a 20 pg guide to cloning my business...
But it would not matter.

There probably is not a single person reading BFI...
That could duplicate and execute my business...

Well, maybe one or two...
But it would take them 12-24 months to become viable.

People a way too paranoid about "stealing ideas"...
If you can work hard and execute a complex business...
And have actual professional skills in a field or two...
Most people are only a threat to themselves.

also i feel really confident in my ability to spot trends and realize how things / tastes will change before other people do. i've done it in poker as a player and with a few businesses. i see how things are going to play out in fantasy sports and the daily format is just a better / more fun way to play most games (particularly NON NFL games, which have tons of room for growth).

the goal was just to get to market with a better UX and then figure **** out from there. that's where we are now, it's only been ~9 weeks but we have some pretty incredible traction so far. if anyone has any questions i'm happy to answer them here.

so it would work just like eHarmony, then...

im not sure about on top of a tv , but this seems like it would make a good mobile / iphone / ipad / android app .

Have you had a failed startup yet?

When they came out with twitter a few years ago, I thought it was one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. It seemed really stupid to me on a few levels. First, it was (and still is) extremely similar to facebook statuses. Second, you were limited to 140 characters in your post, making it difficult to generate a lot of content.

I ended up being wrong about twitter. I think this is because of two reasons. First, facebook statuses are bogged down by the entire facebook social-network umbrella. You could look through your news feed to find updates, but many times they would be completely useless (people you are not that interested in being friends with), and other times you would miss out on important updates that just didn't make the cut on your feed. Second, twitter became cool. Once celebreties, politicians, and businessmen joined, it wasn't just a platform to find out what your friends were up to, it became a way to stay informed about what people were thinking about, what they were doing, what was trending.

There are other aspects of facebook that are mimicked on other websites. For example, there are plenty of album websites where you can upload photos and send it out to a bunch of people. The concept of playing games (think farmville) with your friends, has existed since the inception of the internet. Facebook is a platform that brings all of these things together, but in some cases to make it truly effecient, you need to have speciality websites that cater to a certain demand.

Which brings me to my idea: a new way to advertise events. Facebook and twitter focus on who you are and what you think, but they don't talk about what you do. Facebook has 'events', but it's an absolutely atrocious platform. A few of my problems with it are:

1. You have no way of searching for events that you could be interested in.

2. Once an event is over, it falls off your page, never to be seen again.

3. Facebook is very public, and while I know you can make a private event, sometimes you want something in between where people in a select group can view the event, but your parents/siblings never know about it.

Overall, I personally haven't used facebook events since college ended. When I'm sitting at home looking for something to do, I don't check facebook--I have to call my friends up individually or mass text. Even in college, it wasn't much more viable than evite (which itself has a lot of issues). I think most people used it at some point when they lost their phone and had to get a new number, which goes to show how people didn't really appreciate it for its full intent.

I really think there's a hole in the social-media market right now for event planning. I realize there are at least a hundred metromix.com type sites and foursquare.com is close to what I propose, but they have a few problems. First, they are focusing on the daunting task of integrating entire metrapolitan areas. Second, what keeps people coming back to facebook is their ability to interact with othes that are close to them. Metromix.com is just a listing of things to do. Foursquare.com a place where you can check into places and become frequent customers of certain establishments, but it is a solitary interaction. There is some fun in going to a coffee shop enough to be it's 'Mayor' (a feature on foursquare) and you can recommend places to friends or see what friends have done in locations near you, but you don't have as many opportunities to share these experiences with a lot of friends. Foursquare.com tells you to explore your city, but you are exploring the city alone, and what's the point of social media without the ability to make new friends and brag to your old ones?

I mentioned that starting a new site for a metropolitan area is too daunting of a task, but what about at a small suburban college? In the case of a school like Northwestern, their students know what bars exist, but they don't always know who's going to be at which one. Also, with downtown Chicago 45 minutes away, you don't actually know about every place a college student might be. A cool hang out like McGee's only spreads via word of mouth, and I'm sure there are other bars downtown that could become potential Nortwhestern hang outs if there were online listings for them.

So what I propose is a site that you can either view as a guest or log in using your .edu email. Guests can see what locations (bars, parties, speakers, restaurants) are available to Northwestern students. Members can make a profile and interact with other friends in an attempt to let the entire world know what their schedule will be like.

Now, this definitely sounds very facebook-ey (and it is), but the time to try and take a bite into facebook has never been better. Zuckerberg's popularity is at an all time low. He opened up facebook to the world. He sells our information to companies. He screwed over those handsome Winklevoss twins.

Facebook is not cool anymore. When I got friended by my 55 year old aunt in Belgium, facebook stopped being fun. People constantly talk about deleting their profiles, and quite a few members already have their pictures hidden (or very limited profiles). Yeah, I'm sure freshamn still facebook other people in their hall, but I don't think they interact on the site with the same excitement that we did when we started as freshman, and when the site existed back then it was pretty worthless. The features were very limited: you could have one profile picture, a bit of information about your interests/favorite movies/quotes, and a text wall that could be spammed or deleted by any user. Facebook was way worse than the top social-network site at the time (myspace), but it suceeded. Why's that?

It's because facebook was a right of passage for college students. For me and my peers, there was quite a bit of excitement upon getting your college email. Nothing like that exists anymore. The college seniors who graduated this year were on facebook as juniors in high school.

So in short, we are solving 2 problems of social media.

1. We don't have a good platform for saying what we do, who we do it with, why we like it, and what you should do.

2. There's nothing cool for college kids to join with their .edu email addresses.

How do we solve it?

By creating an exclusive website for college students. They get to upload which bars they go to. They get to create parties that they want their classmates to attend. They get to advertise speakers that will be visiting campus. People will be able to see what's going on at campus without a profile, but they won't be able to see what users are saying about it and which events their friends are going to.

What happens next?

If this site catches fire in one school, it will be easy to create for another (there's excellent scallability in online start-ups, and college students are constantly talking to one another about ideas like this). If it becomes a staple of how american college student's social lives are run, it will already be an extremely successful venture for myself and my partners. However, it has real-world applicability too, and the potential to become massively popular.

Eventually, we can start up sites not just for niche colleges, but for niche demographics. Instead of having sub-sites for each university, we can start one for gay/lesbian/bi/transgender in Chicago. A social group like that would be particularly interested in a site like this because if you're gay and you move into a new city, it's pretty difficult to make new friends in the gay community if all the people you work with are straight. However, there should be a place for people with similar interests of a similar niche to come together and talk about what they do, why they do it, and what you should do.

cliffs of logic:
- college kids need some fun social networking with .edu address
- pretty anti-zuckerberg movement going on right now
- no one (i know) uses facebook groups or events. most of it is photo/stalking based or apps that have been integrated into it.
- lots of small problems with facebook b/c its too large/uncool
cliffs of product:
- exclusive location based social networking
- social calendar
- meeting up for various niches

i have ideas for features/implementation if anyone with credentials wants to get in touch. i just dont have the experience/programming knowledge to make anything of this scale happen

I really like this idea about customized meal plans. The only thing, is that I usually don't have time to cook all my meals. Hugh Jackman probably has a personal chef prepare everything for him. It'd be nice to figure out a way to outsource all of that without having to hire a personal chef.

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html